The secret military documents of the time, which were declassified, show that there was a deliberate intention to try the pump effect against the humans beings and a second purpose, putting in respect the URSS triumphant and the new emerging socialist States in the East and Asia: it had started the cold war!
In the XIX century Feuerbach and Marx focused the debate about the concept of alienation on the religion issue. Feuerbach’s analysis postulates that belief in religion was an intellectual error that could be correct by education. Marx’s criticizes Feuerbach to fail understanding why people fall into religious alienation. Marx’s thesis was that religion is a response to alienation in material life; their main corollary was the struggle for changing material life, the pathway to emancipate human consciousness from all alienation.
Lukács' understanding alienation as a historical loss of totality that we can already find on the historical trajectory of institutions of social life, creating a “second nature” were the individual person can´t find the world meaning. When Lukács applies this concept to the history of intellectual representation, looking to the Grecian movement from epic poetry to tragedy and then to philosophy, notes that the source of significance became progressively more transcendent to immediate life and individual consciousness. Considering the modernity, he proposes a renewed relation between individual conscience and the knowledge of world where meaning can again be found, rebuilding a new totality, new forms of art and communication.
The possibility to recognize that utopia on a good sense, the unity of the global representation of the word with the citizen consciousness, postulates the opposed possibility, the full alienation of the individual person, manipulated by a global power, economic, political and ideological. The concept of double negation employed by Marcuse is a critical response to negation of personal freedom by an oppressive/repressive socio/economic system and to the development of individual-critical consciousness.
When analyzes the concept of alienation we don’t want to obliterate the ontological issue and the philosophical contribution of existentialism, as a plural literary-philosophical phenomenon crossing two centuries. The core of this study is not the fundamental debate about the “meaning of being”_ the paradoxical presence of God, from Kieergard, the challenge of nihilism, “God is dead,” from Nietzsche, the “Dasein,” (“being that we ourselves are”), from Heidegger, “the existentialism is a new humanism,” from Sartre…We wants to discuss the political dimension of the human being, and what means the good and the devil, for the moral of XXI century polices.
Utilitarian ethics of Jeremy Bentham and Stuart Mill assumes that "not only any action of a private individual, but all the Government measures"[33] must improve the well-being and reduce suffering. Far away the primacy of duty (eudainomia) from Aristotle, he based morality of action on benefits back to their subject and/or in the principle of less suffering caused to the "other".
Ethical dilemmas
The classic example of resolving an ethical dilemma on the basis of the principle of utilitarianism, is the political and moral justification of the launch of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and, later the second over Nagasaki, comparing more than 200.000 confirmed dead with the estimated more than one million others casualties, expected by the military strategists, if the USA choose to invade and conquer Japan using conventional weapons.
The most common moral objection against the resolution of this ethical dilemma by nuclear holocaust of the Japanese people, lies in the intrinsic value of human life, that in the Kantian categorical imperative is an end in itself and cannot be used/annihilated as a means to benefit others, even to get a higher benefit, in this case, reducing casualties.
Placed the problem on that moral equation, modern ethics and morality, in its practice, seems to become inconsistent and in the theory a real paradox.
But in the weeks before the explosion of the atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima., most of the scientists who worked on the development of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan project, tried to prevent his discharge directly over the Japanese cities, proposing a strategy for the explosion in open space, in order to demonstrate their destructive power. Confronted with that alternative and with hesitancy of the leader's project, the military command resorted to the threat, blackmail and manipulation of information. After the first discharge, imposed the second, invoking the argument that the Japanese militarists didn't want to surrender.
The secret military documents of the time, which were declassified, show that there was a deliberate intention to try the pump effect against the humans beings and a second purpose, putting in respect the URSS triumphant and the new emerging socialist States in the East and Asia: it had started the cold war!
Those scientists, conscious of the dangers of the military use of nuclear energy, and the risks of new clashes that could lead to the extinction of humanity, create a civic and political movement called Movement of Scientists, who came to bring together 515 scientists from Harvard and MIT in 1945, on the basis of a program that would be the support of their speeches, books and articles and which wanted to lead the USA Government to an international agreement with the URSS. Their final propose was that nuclear weapons never more will be produced. Let's see their arguments:
1- Other Nations would soon be able to produce atomic bombs.
2- No effective defense was possible.
3- Mere numerical superiority in atomic weaponry offered no security.
4- A future atomic war would destroy a large fraction of civilization.
5- Therefore, “International cooperation of an unprecedented kind is necessary for our survival”.
The “heuristics of fear” was his strategy of propaganda, but the Government managed to dismantle it in 1947 and adopted this speech exactly to the opposite end.
Let´s take two new issues: The Armed Forces Museum of Paris, at the “Palais des Invalides”, in the section dedicated to II World War, illustrate with a tragic dashboard the number and nationality of his victims: at the top, the USSR, with 26 million people. China suffered 12,6 million dead.[34] The Germany and Poland share the same number of 6 million more 6 million dead. The Japan follows them with 2,6 million. Yugoslavia 1,5 million. Philippines 1 million. France 580.000. Romania and Greece with 460.000 each one. Italy with 444,500. United Kingdom with 445.000. Czechoslovakia with 360.000. USA with 340.000. Netherlands with 240.000. Belgium with 100.000. India with 50.000. Canada with 45.000. Australia with 21.000. Bulgaria with 20.000. New Zealand with 18.000 closes this fateful scale of more than 50 million deaths, from which more than 30 million were civilians.
This tragic balance concerning the number and nationality of his victims is unknown for the common people. The Nations and peoples of the world, but above all the peoples of the USSR and China, gives those lives for the cause of freedom and national sovereignty by the ideal of liberal or socialist democracy and for a hopeful and more just and peaceful world.
And we speak about Nations winners and won, because the fortune of war opened to all of them the right to choose the social and economic regime and the kind of democracy where they would build a common future.
So was written and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the UN in December 10, 1948 (A/RES/217). Drafted primarily by J. P. Humphrey, of Canada, had Dr. P.C. Chang, representative of the People’s Republic of China_ PRC and the positions of the Asian countries, the main mediator of the consensus established around its 30 articles.
We must emphasize that not one of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defends the supremacy of the model of liberal democracy.
And Human Rights not can be reduced to the question of formal "political freedoms". What the article 21, the core of political Human Rights prescribes, is the path to citizenship and to the diversity of democratic regimes.
“Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people should be the basis of the authority of government; this should be expressed in periodic and genuine elections by universal and equal suffrage and should be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”
All other 29 articles which provide the fundamental democratic rights, as the right to employment and social protection, equality of gender and face the law, have the same political dimension and are subordinate to two ethical imperatives that the Declaration proclaims, the “imperative of the dignity” and “the imperative of peace”:
“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,”
This dignity will be protected…
“…if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,”
And will only be defended with
“… the development of friendly relations between nations. “
However the political debate about Universal Declaration of Human Rights is today reduced to the issue of formal liberties.
Those are the problems of political alienation and the absence of critical information in the mass media.
We could also refer to the ethical dilemmas arising from the fact that, in times of crisis, as the current, budgets for health be reduced, but the services of financial debt are met strictly by Governments. And, in this context, recalling the recent (2014) controversy between the Portuguese Minister of Health, which considered “totally immoral” the price of a new drug for hepatitis C and the President of the association SOS Hepatitis, who stated that ' immoral ' patients die without new medicine. The case is that an American pharmaceutical enterprise wants to sell a new drug in Portugal, with a high cure rate, by 48.000 Euros /patient.
The Portuguese Government, considering the price established for the medicine “sofosbuvir” in Egypt (around 700 euros) and the respective GDP (5,93 times lower than the euro zone’s GDP), proposes the establishment of a joint alliance of European Member States for the definition of a maximum price for treatment with this medication 5,93 times higher than the price offered in the Egypt (around 4.100 € compared with 700 €).
Those five examples are useful as a demonstration that the practical application of ethical principles, and ethics practices, such as bioethics, need to be addressed in conjunction with the conceptualization of a new global political ethics, without which the discussion of ethical dilemmas risk to being predetermined by the hidden power of political alienation.
See full text in Chapter of Proceedings book of The World Congress of Philosophy_ The Philosophy of Aristotle
(WCP2016), Volume II. Athens 2018.
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